UPDATE 2006-09-06: Version 1.1 is now available, incorporating most of the suggestions you made. Available at the same places as before.

Okay, I don't normally post in the Coffeehouse to advertise stuff I've posted in the Sandbox, but fact is that the Sandbox gets a lot less traffic and I think this is pretty cool (but then again, I did make it, so that figures )

It's an add-on for Internet Explorer that provides "find as you type" functionality similar to that in Firefox, for Internet Explorer (5, 6 and 7!).

As it is, I can't even make the shortcut keys for next and previous work when the toolbar doesn't have focus. It just doesn't appear like a toolband can handle accelerators when it doesn't have the input focus (this may be possible in Vista with the IContextMenu2
interface, but I haven't tried this yet, and it would be Vista only and would probably still require the toolbar to be visible for it to work).

If this is even possible, it probably requires a separate BHO next to the toolbar, so it would be far from trivial to implement. This already took up way too much of my free time as it is!

EDIT: If anyone from the IE team wants to chip in on how to accomplish this, it would be most welcome.

Number of results for "block" where price == free: 0
Number of results for "manager" where price == free AND integratesWithIE == true: 0;

...and even the irrelevant results found looked like extremely tacky software.

Your point being?

There is no point. All the addons suck and there is no adblocker.

Which addons suck? I haven't looked at all of them in details but I know some of them are good. Some charge money for them as well! Does that make them suck?
There is ongoing review of the addons and feedback is appreciated on which onese are better than others. A general statement of "all the addons suck" doesn't help us much when that clearly is not the case

﻿If this is even possible, it probably requires a separate BHO next to the toolbar, so it would be far from trivial to implement. This already took up way too much of my free time as it is!

I did a brief amount of research, and it appears the way to do this would be to register a keyboard hook. It would probably still take a BHO because the toolbar doesn't get loaded until it's shown. It's definitely something I'll look at when I get around to
doing the next version though.

EDIT: And I think I can then call IWebBrowser2::ShowBrowserBar to show/hide the toolbar based on the keys. Looks like I'll definitely do this for the next version (at least give it a shortcut key, the "show when you start typing approach" is probably difficult
because I may not be able to tell if the user is typing in some form field or the address bar). No guarantees on when the next version will be though.

﻿
Which addons suck? I haven't looked at all of them in details but I know some of them are good. Some charge money for them as well! Does that make them suck?

Yes

- I'm not going to pay for an addon when I can have the same functionality for free with firefox.
- There are 10's of addons that do popup blocking while IE already can block popups. I don't need double functionality.
- I suspect most free addons made by a company will also install spyware or adware on my pc,
- Most of them provide more functionality than I want. Example: Why does a popup blocker also want to check my email for trojans? That's a totally different thing and I simply need 1 function: block ads nothing more, nothing less. Nowhere to find.

DMassy wrote:﻿
Which addons suck? I haven't looked at all of them in details but I know some of them are good. Some charge money for them as well! Does that make them suck?

Yes

- I'm not going to pay for an addon when I can have the same functionality for free with firefox.
- There are 10's of addons that do popup blocking while IE already can block popups. I don't need double functionality.
- I suspect most free addons made by a company will also install spyware or adware on my pc,
- Most of them provide more functionality than I want. Example: Why does a popup blocker also want to check my email for trojans? That's a totally different thing and I simply need 1 function: block ads nothing more, nothing less. Nowhere to find.

I concurr, but rather than "block ads", I'd look for a simple Regex (or wildcard)-based URL filter, that way you can do more than just block ads, but any other "objectional" or slow resources.

DMassy wrote:﻿
Which addons suck? I haven't looked at all of them in details but I know some of them are good. Some charge money for them as well! Does that make them suck?

Yes

- I'm not going to pay for an addon when I can have the same functionality for free with firefox.
- There are 10's of addons that do popup blocking while IE already can block popups. I don't need double functionality.
- I suspect most free addons made by a company will also install spyware or adware on my pc,
- Most of them provide more functionality than I want. Example: Why does a popup blocker also want to check my email for trojans? That's a totally different thing and I simply need 1 function: block ads nothing more, nothing less. Nowhere to find.

I concurr, but rather than "block ads", I'd look for a simple Regex (or wildcard)-based URL filter, that way you can do more than just block ads, but any other "objectional" or slow resources.

Great to have some more detailed feedback than "all addons suck"
These are definitely issues we are aware of and looking to address in the future. Stay tuned.

Here's what I think it will take:
1. Create a BHO (Browser Helper Object) that gets loaded when IE starts. This won't be too difficult, it's just another COM object that only needs to implement IObjectWithSite, much less than a toolband.
2. In the BHO's SetSite function, use SetWindowsHookEx to register a keyboard hook for the IE process.
3. In the keyboard hook procedure, look for ctrl-f (or f3) and when it's found don't pass it up the hook chain to prevent opening the real find window. Then use IWebBrowser2:: ShowBrowserBar to show the find toolbar.
4. Now the tricky part: giving focus to the textbox. Even if IE gives focus to the toolbar when ShowBrowserBar is called, it would give it to the toolbar (the buttons) not the textbox. If IE gives focus to the toolbar I might be able to set some global flag
that tells the toolbar "if you get focus, pass it on to the textbox", but that might be dangerous because multiple copies of the toolbar can be running in the same process (either in multiple windows or with IE7 in multiple tabs; they all get their own copy
of the toolbar). If IE doesn't set focus to the toolbar (or if that approach won't work for some other reason) I can still (hopefully) use the IWebBrowser2::HWND member to get IE's window handle, then recursively use EnumChildWindows to find my toolbar and
the edit box. Or something.

I have no clue if any of that actually works, but that's how I think it could be done.